New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) by Simple Minds

One of the occupational hazards of writing about music for a living is that you spend so much time listening to new releases, or stuff that you’re writing about, that you don’t often get chances to listen to the music that made you want to write in the first place.

Sometimes, however, writing about music affords that opportunity. I was thrilled to rediscover New Gold Dream before going to review Simple Minds in Liverpool. I first heard it a few years after it came out in 1982, but listening to it again was wonderful, and I ended playing it more than anything else this year.

At the height of the band’s stadium-conquering pomp, Jim Kerr all but disowned their early records. Gazing out at crowds of fans, it was perhaps difficult to bang on about albums that only took them into clubs and universities. But New Gold Dream escaped the scorched-earth policy, and he now rightly regards it as their best.

At a turning point … Simple Minds. Photograph: Virginia Turbett/Redferns

New Gold Dream captures the band’s turning point. They were at the apex of the experimental, European sturm und drang of the Empires and Dance period, but had not yet completely embraced the more epic (and eventually more lumpen) music that would follow. New Gold Dream is vast, but has a lightness of touch that’s often eluded them. That may have something to do with the shifting, fluid rhythms – oddly, the album features three drummers (Mel Gaynor subsequently joined the band). I like to think it’s because they found the kind of Midas touch every artist dreams of, and were loth to burden such heavenly music with too many guitars or drums.

There’s an almost elemental purity throughout New Gold Dream. When I hear the heady seasonal waltz of Someone Somewhere in Summertime and the hushed, hymnal Big Sleep I think of mountains, altitude, beams of sunlight, crystal waters, clear air and artistic ambition triumphing over commercial demands. It sounds fresh enough – at 33 years old – to be a new release. I want to play it again already. Dave Simpson

More by Shivers

I spent the first half of this year trying to work out just where I wanted to be in the world. I went to California; I returned to London; I thought about Charleston, Memphis, Vermont, about little towns in the US midwest where no one would ever think to look for me.

And in this state of limbo, particular songs, particular records became a kind of certainty for me.

One of those albums was the Shivers’ More, released in 2011. It’s a breakup album, a song cycle of sorts, that moves through the collapse of a relationship and on to regret, defiance, the hope of reunion and, finally, resignation.

This year I skipped through the album’s more buoyant numbers, and listened over and over to its most lovelorn tracks: My Mouth Is for My Love, Love Is in the Air, Two Solitudes, So Long Woman and the title song.

I’m not certain why they met my mood so exactly. It was perhaps a combination of two realisations: first, that I was breaking up with the city that had been my home for 15 years; and second, that after spending the longest time seeking isolation, I found – to my confusion – that I wanted to be close to people. I felt a profound desire to belong, for what felt like the first time in my life.

I listened to the album’s title track again and again as I boarded planes, drove through deserts, watched the countryside unspool through train windows, looking for a new place to be. On those journeys, my ear would cling always to a line that seemed to sum up something of what I hoped to find: “More golden, more open,” it runs, “more happy than just hopin’.” Laura Barton

Interiors by Glasser

When songs burrow into my head during the day, they bob back up while I sleep, sometimes soundtracking entire warped storylines or cutting in and out as scenes as I dream. It’s been two years since the Boston-born electronic artpop musician Glasser released her second album, Interiors, and I still can’t get it out of my head. I wake up with the percussive gasps of Design playing in a loop in my head, or find myself humming the Auto-Tuned vocal refrain from Keam Theme while walking home from work.

When Glasser – real name Cameron Mesirow – first appeared in 2010 with her debut album, Ring, her propulsive pop sent writers groping for comparisons: a bit Björk here, a little Four Tet there. By the time she released Interiors in 2013, critics seemed less enamoured – but I was hooked. Every time I play this album, its crafted ticks and rippling melodies sound as arresting as when I first heard them.

I’ll always associate Interiors with an odd period of limbo, when I was suddenly leaving New York to return to London, and falling for an American man. The sharp edges and reflective surfaces of the songs Mesirow wrote reminded me of the skyline I was due to leave behind and seeped into my dreams in the weeks around my move. There’s a beautiful sense of architecture and craft to this album; new sonic textures jut out at me every few listens. Mesirow’s gossamer voice and euphoric synths nudge me back to my mindset two years ago – and those jolting dreams of blurring faces and gleaming buildings set to her songs. Tshepo Mokoena

Fear of a Black Planet by Public Enemy

This year I entered middle age. I’d never quite been sure what the threshold for this phase of life was. I’d read 35 and I’d read 40, and I preferred the latter because I was not that age yet. But in 2015, I learned how it feels to be middle-aged: it’s when you realise that the continuous present you’ve been living in all your life is, to someone else, the distant past.

It happens most commonly in conversation. You illustrate a point by making reference to something you know is ubiquitous but your interlocutor has never heard of. Even better than this is when the interlocutor knows what you’re talking about, but considers this thing – the comedy of Chris Morris, say, or the films of Richard Linklater – to be the most sparkling of forgotten treasures, a secret only they know about.

It then occurs to you that the things you believe to be essential, the building blocks of the world, may not be essential at all. That maybe a millennial could make a piece of navel-gazing generational satire (a Girls) without having seen, or paid due deference to, Slacker (or even Thirtysomething). Or that Kendrick Lamar could make a politically conscious hip-hop record without owing a debt to Public Enemy.

Then a third thing happens: you rush home, you find a quiet room and you play some Public Enemy. You do so with trepidation. After all, they were a group whose most recognisable member was a fool with a big clock around his neck. A group with dodgy political associations and reductive messages, who employed a gang of dancing stormtroopers on stage. You listen to some of the raps, about the spread of Aids or being “got” like Jesus, and you cringe, not only at the words but also at your adolescent self.

As a teenager, you didn’t pay much attention to the lyrics. You just absorbed the rhythms, Chuck D’s martial intonation, Flavor Flav’s ludicrous exclamations. You remember that this music connects with you not because of its significance but because of its power – its force, its sheer aggression. It was the way the brass dropped out into distortion at the start of Welcome to the Terrordome, the way Flav screamed at John Wayne in Fight the Power. It was in tune with the testosterone thumping around your body.

Just remembering that reconnects you with the music. There is nothing else like this, you tell yourself. No contemporary music that is so direct, so unfiltered. And you know you might be fibbing to yourself, subconsciously making your own youth seem more special than it was, but you don’t care, because that connection was genuinely made and it will stay with you till you die. And then you play the record again. Paul MacInnes

Sleaze and Morning Mixes by Luke Howard

Without wishing to sound melodramatic about current events, I can’t think of a year when I’ve so required music to temporarily shut out the world and transport me somewhere else. The escape route I’ve most frequently chosen is disco: I’ve always loved it, but 2015 was the year my love spiralled into obsession, when the full, unspeakable horror of what a man can spend on discogs.com after a few glasses of wine on a Thursday night was brought home to me.

I got particularly fascinated by the curious subgenre of sleaze or morning music – the stuff certain New York and San Francisco gay clubs of the 1970s and 80s played as the night wound down. At its most heterogeneous, it was like a strange precursor of Balearic music: the DJs would play anything they felt fit the mood, from Cliff Richard’s Some People to OMD’s Souvenir.

The sleaze/morning mixes that Horse Meat Disco’s Luke Howard has posted on Soundcloud over the last few years aren’t as eclectic as that. They deal mostly in downtempo disco and soul of uniformly high quality but varying degrees of obscurity. At one extreme, there’s Diana Ross’s I Ain’t Been Licked and Johnny Bristol’s Hang on in There Baby; at the other, there’s Night People by the Top Shelf, whose name was presumably supposed to indicate a certain classiness but somehow suggests Razzle magazine instead. They managed one album on a label with a shakily hand-drawn logo.

I’ve listened to these mixes more than any album this year, spent ages working out what the more arcane tracks are. They’ve transfixed me, partly, I suspect, because Howard’s definition of sleaze frequently involves music on which the emotional volume control seems to have been whacked up to full. The sad songs really pile on the misery: the lip-wobbling stoicism of Sharon Ridley’s Changin’, the crashing, heavily orchestrated anguish of Johnnie Taylor’s What About My Love?, the way Barbara Mason gradually ratchets up the grief and the guilt on Darling Come Back Home.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, there’s a kind of boggling, crazed euphoria. The lead singer of the Modulations sounds like he can barely contain himself during Love at Last. There’s a chance that Bionic Boogie intended Dance Little Dreamer to be a cautionary tale about nightlife excess, but it makes taking drugs and dancing sound about as dizzily exciting an activity as life has to offer.

It’s like music in italics, and there’s something incredibly deft and skilful about the smoothness with which Howard’s mixes shift between those two polarities: it’s music you can lose yourself in, sumptuous and dramatic, enthralling and deep – exactly what I wanted and want to hear. Alexis Petridis

Laughing All the Way to the Cleaners: the Best of by the Lemonheads

I always tell myself that my summer holiday will be a chance to work my way through some of the piles of albums that have been sitting, to my wife’s irritation, on my dining table. I wouldn’t say that’s the prime motivation of my preference for holidays in France, involving large amounts of driving, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a significant factor in it: I actively enjoy heading along unfamiliar roads for hours at a time, CDs spinning away, periodically coming across a jewel.

But, equally, every year I dig out some things I know I love, but haven’t listened to for ages, and sometimes they take over. This summer it was a two-CD set called Laughing All the Way to the Cleaners: The Best of the Lemonheads, which came out in 2011. It’s hardly a perfect album: at 47 tracks, it’s too long. It doesn’t give enough credit to Ben Deily, who wrote a chunk of the band’s songs before Evan Dando turned the Lemonheads into himself plus a rotating cast of Australians. And some of the selections are just baffling: Rick James Style would be the most self-indulgent piece of tosh to have ruined an otherwise perfect parent album, had The Jello Fund not also appeared on Come on Feel the Lemonheads, so goodness knows what it’s doing on a best of.

But, oh, those melodies! That sun-burnished voice! Driving around the Normandy countryside in what seemed like an unnaturally hot August, the fields golden with stubble and the shadows deep underneath the trees around village churches that looked as old as time, it was hard to imagine anything better. I tend to be the first awake on holiday, and since the place we were staying was a drive from the nearest bakery anyway, I took to going further afield than I needed to, heading out in the golden dawn, past the first village along the road, past the second, past the third, listening to those songs – It’s a Shame About Ray, Ride With Me, Half the Time, The Outdoor Type, Down About It, Different Drum – until I decided the time really had come to stop and buy some bread.

Back I’d drive, past the war memorials, the sites marking the enclosure of the German armies in the Falaise Pocket exactly 71 years earlier, Dando’s voice accompanying me all the way. I’d get to the house, the rest of the family slowly rising, an hour of music already behind me. And the next morning, I would get up and do exactly the same. It was the greatest pleasure music brought me all year. Michael Hann

The Meadowlands by the Wrens

Had things gone to plan, indie janglers the Wrens’ long-awaited new album may well have ended up as the album I enjoyed listened to the most in 2015. The trouble is, things rarely go to plan with the Wrens. Anyone familiar with the band will nod knowingly at the tongue-in-cheek honorific on their website: “Keeping people waiting since 1989.” In their 21-year existence the band have released just three albums, and it’s now 13 years since the most recent of them, The Meadowlands, came out. A combination of day jobs, serious illness, bad luck and old-fashioned perfectionism held back the follow-up.

In the meantime, Wrens fans have had to make do with cycling through the band’s back catalogue. Thankfully The Meadowlands, in particular, beckons you back, its lovely, layered melodies growing deeper and more complex with each listen. Arcade Fire’s Funeral was said to have been influenced by this album (an indication, perhaps, of just how long the Wrens have been away), and it’s clear that the two bands share a gift of making the mundane seem massive.

The stories here – of bad relationships, career setbacks and all those other tiny disappointments of adulthood – may be routine, but their telling is anything but, with the driving, fuzzy indie of the likes of She Sends Kisses and Ex-Girl Collection building to a dizzying emotional pitch. This is ultimately an album about feeling thwarted, exhausted and sometimes a bit defeated, but plugging on regardless. Whether that’s most people’s idea of an enjoyable listen is up for debate, but it’s certainly the album I reach for in times of crisis.

Meanwhile, the continuing saga of the followup rolls on into its 14th year, but there are at least flickers of life. According to the band, the album is “finished” (though it is still in the process of being mastered), and there’s talk of a tentative 2016 release. Given their record, that’s something I’ll believe only when I’m holding the actual finished product in my hands. Regardless, if The Meadowlands is anything to go by, it will be worth the wait. Gwilym Mumford

Thank Me Later, by Drake

I dare say there were many impressions Drake wanted to leave listeners with when he dropped his debut album Thank Me Later in 2010, most of which would involve tormented bouts of soul-searching.

Painting our kitchen dresser a subtle shade of sage green probably wasn’t one of them, but it was what my wife and I had unintentionally associated it with ever since I used it to soundtrack a hot and sensual session of kitchen makeover. Anyway, this year we set out to rectify this situation, taking Thank Me Later with us on a road trip up the west coast of the US. It was the unexpected hit of the holiday, elevating itself above more typically Californian choices – Love, Fleetwood Mac, even the Beach Boys – to become our most frequently played CD.

I’ve long believed that it’s been downhill for Drake ever since Thank Me Later, which is built entirely of bangers from start to finish. But I was admittedly unprepared for some of the scenes that unfolded as we journeyed through Santa Barbara singing “Every time you come around, shut it down like computers”, rolled through Tomales Bay shouting “Oh, you fancy, huh?” and carried on up to Eureka and Portland rapping some of the Canadian’s most excruciating lyrics: “Isn’t it ironic that the girl I wanna marry is a wedding planner?”

Over’s chorus of “What am I doing? What am I doing? Oh yeah, that’s right, I’m doing me!” became not just a well-recited line, but a mantra by which we adhered to at all times, whether that meant eating oysters at 8am, ordering a set of lavender-scented pillows from room service, or trying to squeeze six bottles of Sonoma wine into our hold luggage on the way home.

Thanks to this trip, Thank Me Later no longer reminds my wife of the time we painted that cupboard. Instead, she now sings Fancy – “Hair done, nails done, everything did” – to her parent’s dog whenever she’s had a pampering at Rustys Canine Kingdom. Which, I suppose, is marginally more in keeping with Drake’s original intentions. Tim Jonze

Multi-Love, by Unknown Mortal Orchestra

A hint of the other … Unknown Mortal Orchestra. Photograph: Motormouthmedia

This has been, alongside everything else, the unofficial year of polyamory. It’s in that low-rent swingers comedy The Overnight and Gaspar Noé’s gauzy erotica film Love. It’s in tales of Burning Man festival and the essence of popular dating app 3nder (no guesses). And it’s the subject of Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s album Multi-Love, based on the true story of frontman Ruban Nielson’s dice with dangerous three-way liaisons, and with which I have become embarrassingly obsessed.

Although everyone else has picked old records, Multi-Love has been my road trip album, my deadlines-are-looming album, the album that has my endorphins on speed dial as I bellow along. But I think my attachment has deepened because it’s all so exotic – or, given that Nielson and his love triangle existed in hyper-liberal Portland, exotically hipster. A stark contrast with my rather beige existence, where hippy free love stuff is considered something as “other” as spiralisers and heroin, Multi-Love is a window into a world where three people can fall for each other and presumably do other things with each other, too. I don’t mean I’ve been taking the album as a literal lifestyle choice; I just mean that, in the grand tradition of rock’n’roll escapism, it dangles the magic carrot of what I am not.

Like the best albums, though, Multi-Love’s songs transcend their themes. Nielson could be singing about the latest range of washing machines and its funk and acid-fried soul would still be as appealing. Clever and complex, it manages to sound old and dusty, and metallic-tanged and futuristic, at the same time – like a neon pink light glowing behind a grubby window. Everything is invitingly claustrophobic, suffocated by the tripled feelings of desire, dejection and detached helplessness as the relationship goes awry. After all, as Mick Fleetwood would probably tell you, an album about getting off with two people is much more exciting than one that deals with heartbreak over one. Kate Hutchinson

Finding heaven in a secondhand store

This year I have rekindled my love of grime, to the point where I’ve sung Doin’ It Again so many times that my wife knows Jammer’s verse off by heart. I’ve sat on the top deck of the ferry to Ikea in Red Hook while listening to Manic Street Preachers’ Slash’n’Burn and loved every minute of it. I got teary-eyed for no apparent reason when Hot Chip played Boy from School at a horrifically corporate gig at SXSW. But the best moment of all happened in a secondhand shop.

People told me about The Thing before I moved to New York. It’s ostensibly a thrift store offering books, clothing and old MASH videotapes, but its basement and back wall are packed with thousands of records. I visited on the first weekend I was in the city and have been going back about twice a month ever since. Nearly all the LPs are $2 and after having to leave my entire record collection at home, I started building a new one. Understandably for a shop whose stock comes from a lot of house clearances, there’s a lot of dross, with an almost unimaginable amount of Ja Rule’s back catalogue clogging up the crates. But there hasn’t been one visit where I’ve left disappointed. There is always something special, and I even bought a portable record player just to accompany me on my trips there.

After listening to a Horse Meat Disco podcast where they profiled Philadelphia Records I tried to see if I could find what they had played. I managed to get most of it in two visits. Another time I got some John Mayall, Badfinger and Shabba Ranks. It got to the point where I wanted to make it interesting by limiting myself to only buying from one label such as Salsoul or West End, or just things produced by Patrick Adams.

If there was one visit I had to select it would be the time in mid-March when it was freezing outside and I managed to get three Teddy Pendergrass LPs. He’s someone I’d listened to intermittently, but as soon as I heard You Can’t Hide From Yourself I understood why so many people had recommended him to me. Brilliant, ebullient soul that even managed to warm up New York during the depths of the polar vortex. Lanre Bakare